Shunyata In Plain English: A Beginner's Guide To Emptiness
Everyone who reads about Buddhism eventually arrives at emptiness, and almost everyone leaves with one of two wrong things: the vague sense that nothing really exists, or the vague sense that everything is connected. Neither is what the word means. Neither would have been worth two thousand years of argument.
What the tradition actually offers is a set of specific arguments about a specific mistake. The mistake is small, it can be stated in a sentence, and you are making it right now about the person reading this one. The arguments were built to be run rather than admired, and the lineage that preserved them also preserved the instructions for running them in a sitting.
This book is that material, arranged as twenty lessons across six modules.
What You Will Work ThroughThe three wrong answers standing between most readers and the real oneWhat is actually being denied, stated precisely, which is the step nearly every English presentation skipsWhy any of this is worth doing, since nobody has ever suffered over a descriptionThe four essential points, the tradition's own procedure, learned as a procedureThe chariot: seven places to look, nothing found in any of them, and the thing still rollsThe same search run on the one reading the sentence, where it stops being comfortableThe self that does not argue back: the one that flinches when the car swerves was never the one you refutedWhy nothing was destroyed and nobody got away with anythingWhere the table went, and production and motion, the arguments that close the last places solidity hidesWhy emptiness is empty too, and what happens to a reader who forgets itThe two truths: not a real world and a fake one, but two questions with two right answersDependent arising, which says the same thing from the other directionThe four extremes, and why the tradition walks past all of them out of accuracy rather than cautionAnalysis and rest, alternated, where both halves are the practice and neither one is itHow Each Lesson WorksEach lesson gives you something to read, something to examine, and something to sit with. One thing separates this volume from its companions: the practices here are proofs. You are not asked to accept a conclusion and rest in it. You are handed an argument and asked to run it until it does something, which is what the tradition meant by analytical meditation. Included: a glossary that strips the connotations English adds to the vocabulary, an appendix on the Heart Sutra and why the text most readers met this in contains no arguments, an appendix on the root texts and which translations to read, and an appendix on the old disagreement between analysis and direct recognition, given without a verdict.
Where The Path Comes FromThe arguments follow Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika. The path, the two truths, and the sevenfold chariot follow Chandrakirti's Madhyamakavatara. The practice instructions and the warnings about negating too much and too little come from the insight section of Tsongkhapa's Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path. The reading presented is Prasangika, and the book says so.
Who It Is ForThe reader who has met emptiness in a dozen books and can define it without being able to use it. The practitioner who was handed the conclusion and never the method. And anyone willing to be shown that this argues against one specific assumption about how things exist, and not against the reality of the world, the person, or anything that matters to them.
Wheels, axle, floorboard, pole. Take it apart and look for the chariot. It is not in there. Now get in, and let it carry you home.
Customer Reviews
ThriftBooks ® and the ThriftBooks ® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
